


Moving on

by stinkyworms



Category: Beetlejuice - All Media Types, Beetlejuice - Perfect/Brown & King
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, not beetlebabes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24579757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stinkyworms/pseuds/stinkyworms
Summary: Lydia has felt her own death coming for a while. When it finally does, a familiar face is there to guide her.
Relationships: Beetlejuice & Lydia Deetz
Comments: 15
Kudos: 101





	Moving on

When you spent as much time around death and the dead as Lydia had, you get quite good at being able to sense when someone was close to the end of their life. The first time she had sensed this was her school P.E. teacher. The aura of _wrongness_ slowly increasing over the course of a month until, finally, he didn’t come into work the day of her hockey tournament. A heart attack, the principal announced a few days later.

After that, Lydia got better at sensing the miasma that followed those whose days were numbered. Death, it seemed, was surprisingly common when you could sense it in anyone who passed you in the street. The homeless man she passed on her way to University, a colleague in her first job who had recently been promoted over her, the barista in that one expensive coffee shop her wife insisted on visiting every Sunday afternoon because that’s when the cakes were freshly made.

Her father.

Eventually, of course, death was going to come for her too. This was a fact that had never particularly bothered Lydia. She had literally been to hell and back in her teenage years, which tends to relieve any doubts about the afterlife that may afflict most normal people.

But when the diagnosis came, she couldn’t help but be irritated that it was _all too soon._ She wouldn’t get to see her daughter graduate, wouldn’t get to watch Delia completely redecorate the house she spent her teenage years _again,_ wouldn’t get to have yet another argument with her wife over cakes at fancy hipster coffee shops.

Tonight, she knew, was her last night. The _feeling,_ she had regretfully never given it a more creative name, had been steadily growing in her over the last month, and she knew this was it. Having said goodnight to her wife and daughter, Lydia decided to head downstairs and look through one of her wife’s memory scrapbooks one last time.

As she reached the living room, hand brushing through the many books on the bookshelf they had proudly displayed, she heard a familiar gravelly voice ring out from behind her.

“Hey Scarecrow,”

She didn’t need to turn around to know it was him. Beetlejuice, the demon she had spent one of the weirdest few days of her life with when she was just 15.

Looking over her shoulder, she saw him casually leaning against the fireplace mantle. He looked like he hadn’t changed a day. His green hair poked out from under a grey hat that read “GUIDE”, a long grey coat covering what she immediately recognised as the tattered monochromatic striped suit.

“You’re a bit early, aren’t you?” She smiled at him, turning back to the bookshelf and pulling out the scrapbook her hand had been hovering over.

“Wanted to know if you could still see me,” Beetlejuice said, “Should’ve known growin’ up wouldn’t change you, still the strangest breather I’ve ever met.”

“Strange and unusual,” Lydia agreed, turning back to him.

Now that she was fully facing him, she could see he looked more nervous than his casual pose against her fireplace would give away. His hands kept moving from his sides to ring against each other, and he couldn’t fully maintain eye contact.

Lydia gathered the last of her strength, which she felt was disappearing more rapidly by the moment, crossed the room and dragged him into a hug. He still smelled as terrible as he did the day she had said goodbye to him, like wet grave dirt and cigarettes and week old roadkill, but Lydia decided her last few hours was not the time to care. He flinched when she grabbed him, taking a full second to hug her back, slowly wrapping his hands around her waist and burying his head into her shoulder.

“I missed you, you big idiot,” She said, feeling tears threatening to form behind her eyes.

“You’re tall now,” was all he said back, his voice half muffled by the pyjama shirt she was wearing.

They both broke into giggles, still holding on to each other. Lydia had always felt worried that if she ever met him again, things wouldn’t be the same, that it would be just too weird. She was glad to be proven wrong.

When they finally broke apart. She motioned to the hat he was wearing, the letters looked like they had been hand sewn on, and badly.

“They give you your old job back?” She questioned. Beetlejuice had told her that before he was banished, he had been an official guide to the newlydeads of the world.

“Oh, nah. This isn’t an official guiding or anything. I broke too many laws last time when they banished me. But I saw your name come up on the register, and I pulled a few strings, if you know what I mean,” He made a lewd hand gesture, and waggled his eyebrows, “I wanted to make sure you got the best, you know.”

“I feel honoured,” She said, breaking out into more giggles.

Suddenly, Lydia’s legs felt like they had been turned to jelly and her stomach flipped as she lost the ability to stand. Strong hands steadied her, and she allowed Beetlejuice to guide her to the couch, where she all but collapsed, coughs racking her body.

“Won’t be long, now,” Beetlejuice said, nonchalantly, like he was waiting for a train and not the end of Lydia’s entire lifespan. That’s how he had always treated death, like it was just something that happened, but wasn’t worth dwelling on or getting upset about. Even his own death, after their wedding, he had taken on the chin. More amused by the method Lydia had used to kill him than angry at her for doing so.

“I don’t want to leave them behind,” Lydia admitted, her voice quiet as she looked up to the ceiling where her sleeping family lay above her. While she was never scared of her own death coming for her, she didn’t want to make Emily spend the rest of her teenage years missing a mother, like Lydia had been forced to. Despite being something she had no control over, it felt selfish.

“You don’t have to. We could toss out the rulebook. Done it before,” Beetlejuice said, sounding uncharacteristically empathetic, “You could stick around a bit longer, I’ll even teach you how to haunt properly this time.”

“No, I… I don’t want that,” Lydia said.

Being a ghost was something she had considered, of course. She could wait until her wife Claire, or even Emily, had passed and they could move on together. But she had seen what waiting in the Living World had done to the Maitlands. While they remained positive as the day she had met them, and a constant source of guidance and friendship in her life, she knew that being locked in their own house, watching Lydia’s family grow and change and develop while the two of them remained stationary had hurt them. It had made a deep sense of unhappiness in them that they could just could not root out, no matter how many woodworking or gardening projects they completed. Adam had confided in her once, that the only reason they still stayed behind was because they wanted to make sure Delia had people to be there for her, friends she could rely on until her own end.

Her father had known it too, he must have, because by the time she had gotten the phone call and rushed from New York to the hospital in Connecticut, he had already made the journey to the Netherworld.

She watched as Beetlejuice crossed the room, picked up the scrapbook she had dropped and came back to settle down next to her.

They spent the next hour or so flicking through the various pictures, certificates and newspaper articles Claire had painstakingly put together as a memory of her and Lydia’s life together. Beetlejuice, to his credit, hung on every word of Lydia’s as she talked and talked to him about all the best memories she had from her life, only occasionally chiming in with a rude joke or ridiculous comment. When she felt her strength going, he let her lean against his shoulder and turned the pages for her. When she didn’t want to speak any more and had to close her eyes, he took over the narration of the pictures, making up his own stories, sporadically self-inserting himself into his made-up storylines.

When she woke up, her body felt lighter than it had in months. Her head clearer and the pain that had plagued her for the last year of her life was gone. She felt a cold hand grab hold of hers.

“Come on Scarecrow, oblivion awaits,”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys? Love you guys. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
